Saints for All Occasions

by J. Courtney Sullivan

  Breakfast was served promptly at eight. She slipped into the refectory a minute before the hour and took her seat. There were at present thirty-seven of them. They ate their meals in silence at two long, thin wooden tables, side by side, no one facing anyone else. She and the mother abbess sat together at a small head table. Today, as usual, the others bowed before them as they filed in. Because Mother Cecilia recalled with perfect clarity when they were a pair of young postulants, this always took her by surprise.

  While they ate their eggs, their bread and jam, she noticed Sister Alma looking at her from across the room. Mother Cecilia nodded, and the girl nodded back with a sad smile. She supposed Sister Alma would come to her afterward seeking counsel, as she often had recently. In four days’ time, she would make her final vows. They had all been anticipating it, making preparations in the kitchen and the guest quarters. On Thursday, Sister Alma would become Mother Alma, a permanent member of their community.

  You weren’t supposed to be more or less fond of one girl or another. But Mother Cecilia couldn’t help privately favoring some. Sister Alma had arrived seven years ago, with a master’s in fine arts from the Rhode Island School of Design. She was a painter in New York who had begun to show her work in galleries, to make a name for herself. But then she felt called to something greater. She came to the abbey wearing platform sandals with black leather straps that wrapped around her calves and a dress that was longer in the back than it was in front.

  Like many of them, Sister Alma started as an intern. She lived in the women’s guesthouse for four months and helped with the harvest. She mopped the church floor and scrubbed the pails the nuns used to churn butter. At the end of her term, she asked for a meeting with Mother Cecilia. Of all her jobs, the role of novice mistress was the most essential. Mother Cecilia was the one who helped them decide whether or not they belonged here.

  In that first meeting, Sister Alma spoke of how with thirty had come the realization that many of her friends were only playing at poverty. Once some milestone was reached—a birthday or a marriage or a birth—they moved into million-dollar brownstones. They invited people over for brunch in the garden, and everyone commented approvingly on their beautiful furniture, their elegant sense of style. No one asked where the money came from, perhaps because they knew—rich parents or a fortuitous marriage, or a fortuitous marriage to someone with rich parents. Suddenly, after a decade devoted only to ideas and emotions, things had become paramount.

  She spoke too of the burdens of technology. There was not a young one through the door these recent years who failed to mention how pleased she would be to give up her email account, her cell phone. The word they all used was noise. They could barely stand the noise. Life had become too full of it. There were some in the abbey’s hierarchy who questioned this motive. A few thought it showed a lack of devotion, but Mother Cecilia disagreed. Every generation had arrived at the abbey burdened by its own trials. Each nun was a product of her time, like anyone. Over half a century, she watched them come in waves. In the seventies, they came seeking peace, community, social justice. Now they wanted life to have meaning. They wanted quiet around them and within. Anything might have led them here. What kept them here was faith.

  Some convents had girls as young as sixteen, seventeen years old streaming in, though she doubted many stayed for long. Immaculate Conception did not accept women who hadn’t had some life experience, a talent or a profession.

  One of them had been a Broadway actress, another a Wall Street banker, another still a state senator in Wisconsin. They had a sculptor, whom the abbey sent to Rome to learn marble carving, and a former chemist who made perfumes. Their gifts from those past lives enriched the present.

  Sister Alma said a professor of hers had told his students that the artist’s life was unthinkably hard, that if they could envision themselves doing anything else, then they ought to. It applied just as well to being a nun, she said. Mother Cecilia agreed, and yet she thought it could apply to anything—a mother’s life was that absolute and could never be undone. Still, most women chose it.

  But the artist parallel was a good one. Perhaps an artist felt more deeply than most people, and yet the trade-off was the doubt. She had once read that it took Gilot hours every morning to get Picasso out of bed and to work. A daily ritual of despair to hope.

  Faith was not a constant. Faith took reviving. A nun did not become a nun all at once, but bit by bit. This was what she planned to remind Sister Alma of after breakfast. But when Sister Alma knocked on her office door, she bowed before her and said, “There was a call for you on the hotline this morning, Mother.”

  Mother Cecilia gestured for her to come in.

  They had added the hotline for those who couldn’t get to the abbey to have their prayers heard. They prayed for whatever they were asked. For personal tragedies and world disasters. For soldiers in Iraq and cancer patients at the hospital up the road. It was not unheard of for a caller to have some personal connection to one of the nuns, but Mother Cecilia had never before been the reason for a call.

  “The woman’s name was Nora Rafferty,” Sister Alma said, glancing at a slip of paper in her hand. “She wanted me to tell you that her son died last night. He was in a car accident. It must have been weather related. She said there was no one else involved.”

  She felt like the air had been squeezed from her lungs.

  She tried to keep her voice even. “Did she say which son?”

  “She said his name was Patrick.”

  In the last picture she ever saw, he was sixteen years old. It was how she imagined him now, though he had turned fifty in August.

  “Did you know them well, Mother?” Sister Alma said.

  “A long time ago, yes.”

  The girl looked surprised. As far as anyone but Mother Placid knew, Mother Cecilia had no people of her own in this country.

  “I’m so sorry,” Sister Alma said. “I’ll pray for them. And shall I add him to this evening’s prayers?”

  “No,” she said. But then she changed her mind. “Yes, I mean. That would be nice. Thank you.”

  Sister Alma left the room and closed the door behind her.

  Mother Cecilia began to cry. A car accident. No one else involved. She had made peace with her decision long ago. To leave him with Nora was to leave him to Nora. But Nora hadn’t done enough. She hadn’t listened. Now this.

  She took a breath.

  At Immaculate Conception, they believed that dealing with their struggles in the service of God could have a positive effect on the rest of the world. When you took your final vows, you became a religious and then every act you did became an act of religion. She was meant to wrestle with what was difficult in life, especially in her own family.

  Compassion then. For Nora, for herself. For choices made in another lifetime, when they knew nothing of the world, nothing of their history. Nothing even of their own bodies and what they were capable of. The silence was a form of violence. She had tried to get Nora to see it, but Nora refused.

  She pictured her now. Distraught. But surrounded by her children. Her husband. Charlie’s enormous family, all those characters she had lived with once upon a time. Nora’s children were grown. She had often imagined them married with children of their own. Settled, content. Nora and Charlie, the proud grandparents of an ever-growing brood. She wondered now if Patrick had left behind a wife. Daughters and sons who loved him.

  Mother Cecilia got up from her chair. She walked outside, feeling light-headed.

  She found Mother Placid doing the composting.

  Mother Placid wore her heavy denim habit with a sweatshirt over the top. Work boots with yellow laces; the edges of the soles caked in mud.

  Her dear old friend, keeper of all her secrets. So long since the two of them came through the abbey gates together, since they called each other by their given names. Decades had passed since the last time she thought of herself as Theresa.

  Seeing her expression, Moth
er Placid gave her a worried smile. “What is it?”

  Mother Cecilia took hold of the other woman’s arm to steady herself. “Patrick is dead.”

  “My God. What happened?”

  “A car accident. My sister called.”

  “Really.”

  She had not spoken to Nora in more than thirty years. The letters Mother Cecilia had written were returned, unopened. Dozens of them, still in a box beneath her bed.

  “You should go to Boston for the funeral.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Yes you can. This is just what we voted on.”

  She said it as if it were that simple.

  The trips home had been controversial with some of the oldest nuns. They ran counter to what the cloister had been built on for centuries—you came, and if you were devout, you never left. But in recent years, some abbeys had begun to soften the rules. If someone died or was dying, if your family needed you, you could go away for a short time. The abbey had decided to allow the visits in extreme cases, but until now they had only been theoretical.

  Mother Cecilia had argued that these visits were crucial. Motive and intention were everything. Half the postulants would leave for good, either by their own decision or at the vote of the other nuns. The ones who stayed were called to it and could not be pulled away by circumstance.

  She had never dreamed that she’d be the first to go. That Patrick would be the reason.

  “I can’t leave you now,” she said. “Not with Bishop Dolan set to arrive any day. Bearing bad news, I would assume.”

  “You go when you’re needed. Isn’t that what we decided? I for one am not at all afraid of Dicky Dolan.”

  “Please don’t call him that. You make me nervous.”

  “It seems to me that it’s right,” Mother Placid said. “Nora wants you there. Think about it. Pray on it.”

  “I will.”

  7

  JOHN RAFFERTY SIPPED HIS COFFEE, regarding his wife as she screwed the back onto a pearl earring, her head cocked to one side.

  “What time do you think you’ll be home?” Julia said. “Because. You know. The thing.”

  She nodded toward their daughter at the table.

  Maeve sat staring at her phone, earbuds jammed in, oblivious.

  John’s flight to Chicago was at ten. He’d return on the four o’clock. It was not a good day for a teenage mini-drama, but then, it never was.

  “I’ll definitely be back by eight. Eight-thirty at the latest,” he said.

  He almost set his mug down on the kitchen island, but at the last second, he remembered the new countertop. Julia had had the white marble installed a month ago. The previous marble—only a year old—was black, which, she said, washed out the rest of the kitchen. John thought he could see what she meant. He preferred not to think about the cost. If they could get a few years’ use out of the white, it might not seem so extravagant. He just wouldn’t put anything on it until he was fifty.

  “You okay?” Julia said.

  If she knew what he was thinking, she would say they both worked hard, they could afford it. She would tell him to relax. John sometimes wondered if anyone, upon being told to relax in such a manner, had ever actually succeeded at relaxing.

  “I’m fine,” he said.

  “We’re leaving for school in five minutes,” Julia said.

  Maeve didn’t look up.

  “Hello!” Julia called. “I need to be in the office by eight-thirty. Big client coming in at nine. Chop-chop.”

  She sighed. “She’s ignoring me.”

  “She can’t hear you,” he said, lying for Julia’s benefit.

  John walked over and tapped Maeve on the shoulder.

  She pulled out a single bud.

  “Your mother’s talking to you. Go get ready for school. You’re leaving in five.”

  She half glared at him, but she got up, shuffled off.

  “And we’re having a family meeting tonight!” Julia shouted after her. “Get pumped for that!”

  “Does she seem off this morning?” Julia whispered once Maeve was upstairs. “Do you think she knows that we know or is she just—being herself?”

  “The latter,” he said.

  Julia could always come up with a reason why Maeve was being a shit. She was underslept from going to a slumber party. She was in a fight with a friend. Her upcoming math test had her on edge.

  The truth was that the day she turned thirteen, their daughter had begun to torture them like it was her job. Julia especially. Maeve spoke to her in ways John would never have dared speak to any adult, especially his mother. When he even thought of it, he swore he could taste the soap Nora had used to wash his mouth out thirty years earlier.

  Julia was raised the only child of academics in Palo Alto, parents whose cultural preferences were as important to her upbringing as the lessons of how to tie her shoes or stop at the crosswalk. They liked Simon and Garfunkel, and Joan Didion, and Ethiopian food. She was expected to like these things too. More than that, she did like them. Half the albums she now owned had been pinched from her father’s collection.

  John thought it best to take his parenting cues from her.

  When Maeve was small, he played Barbies with her and Calico Critters and beauty parlor. (I can’t picture this, his sister, Bridget, said when Julia mentioned it once.) Had his own parents ever gotten down on the floor and played with them? He was positive they had not. But after a day spent fighting with overblown, self-satisfied politicians and their hangers-on, there was nothing John enjoyed more than giving voice to a tiny plastic rabbit, or a Ken doll with painted-on sideburns. It took so little to delight his daughter then.

  Even when Maeve was a toddler, Julia felt it was important for them to speak to her with respect. If Maeve begged for one cookie too many, Julia tried to explain precisely why it was a bad idea instead of just saying no. John’s mother would have said something like, The doctor called and told me that if you eat another bite of sugar, your stomach will explode and you’ll die.

  It amazed him how mild Julia was, how patient. She didn’t yell or even have a look that communicated the threat.

  You’ll spoil her rotten, Nora warned. Children crave discipline.

  But Maeve was a miracle. The thing they had tried for and wished for, and finally gotten. They were more terrified of scaring her than they were of spoiling her. Every interaction felt important, as if she would be talking about it in therapy twenty years on if they didn’t play their cards right. When he was a child, John’s mother might slap him with one hand and, a minute later, give him a Popsicle with the other, the whole thing forgotten, forgiven.

  There’s no justification for physical abuse, Julia said. Why would I want my own child to fear me?

  He thought the word abuse was going too far, but he didn’t know how he could ever hit Maeve and then look her in the eye. Had John feared his mother? Yes, of course, without question.

  Throughout Maeve’s childhood, their only form of discipline was time out. It wasn’t exactly a torture chamber. Maeve was made to sit on the bottom step of the staircase with a book for five minutes. He had noted an expression on her face during those sessions. John thought about it a lot these days. It seemed to say, This is a joke and we both know it. This will accomplish nothing.

  Maybe his mother had been right.

  Now Maeve lived inside her cell phone, constantly laughing or gasping at something she saw there. When Julia asked, “What is it?” Maeve would say without fail, “Nothing.”

  They had once been close, but now Julia said the only time she learned anything about their daughter’s life was when she was driving Maeve and her friends to soccer practice or the mall. In the backseat, they’d dissect in great detail who they were mad at, who was mad at them, who had kissed a boy. The girls called kissing “scooping,” so she wouldn’t know what they were talking about. Julia longed to know more. But, she said, her only parental superpower was invisibility. If she asked a question, she wou
ld break the spell.

  Maeve’s adoption had taken on new importance to her. Here too, she found them lacking. There had been one horrible fight when he could almost see the words taking shape in her mouth. Just as John began to wonder how he might stop them, they were out.

  You can’t tell me what to do. You’re not really my mother.

  A few months ago, Julia had started checking the browser history on Maeve’s laptop to make sure she wasn’t developing an eating disorder or chatting with forty-year-old men. John was against it. He said she was bound to discover something awful if she looked hard enough.

  Lo and behold, last night while Maeve was sleeping, Julia found the browser open to a page called the Finding Place. It was an online group offering to reunite girls with their birth mothers. There were discussion topics like Not Fully Belonging in Either World and Was It Legal Adoption or Trafficking?

  Julia brought the computer to him, held it out as if it were evidence from a crime scene. They had talked about it for three hours, time he was planning to use to prepare for today’s meeting. They hadn’t revealed to Maeve yet that they knew. They would tell her tonight, once he got back.

  John could tell Julia was on edge about it. He wanted to console her. But the timing was bad. He needed to focus. He needed the money this trip could potentially bring in. Otherwise, something would have to give.

  His cell phone buzzed on the counter.

  Julia was closer.

  “Is it the car service?” he said.

  She looked down. “It’s your mother.”

  It was as if he had conjured her with those words, car service. As if Nora knew somehow that he was not driving himself to the airport—the only fiscally sensible choice, since he was returning in just a few hours—but that instead, John was taking a hundred-dollar car ride so that he could stare at the New York Times on his BlackBerry in traffic.

  “I’ll call her back,” he said.

  Julia’s phone started to ring. She took it from her pocket and frowned. “Nora again.”

  “It’s about the article,” John said. “Let it go to voice mail.”